Old House Stories: Small Town Queen Anne — Tennessee River Country — Old Photo Album

Bunker Hill Standing Rock Road in Perry County, Tennessee

In the winter of 2006 we were looking for a place in the country. We didn't want to go too far out of town, but we couldn't afford anything too close in, so we searched in bigger and bigger circles. We had Jack and Nancy Rivers helping us, plus we used the real estate resources on the web. Nancy sent some listings to Leslie, of which they picked some to go look at. They had fun but didn't find anything that day. Later we went with Jack out to Perry county to look at a place with an old house and about 9 acres of land. It was quite a long drive (90 miles from Franklin) but when we got there and looked around we both knew that was the place for us.

The property was on a quiet road, nearest neighbors about 300 yards from the house. It had a large grassy yard, long road frontage, and woods behind and to the sides, running up the hill in the back. I walked into the woods straight back from the house that first day but didn't venture up into the woods to the left and right. There was a barn, but for some reason the family had had it surveyed out of (excluded from) the plot of land. I never found out why. We did find out that day that the family had lost their oldest teenaged daughter to cancer and that they had not been coming down to the country much since then. They also lived in the Nashville area.

Now for the house—it's a wood-frame house, but with a couple of peculiarities. First, the form. It had a large and unusual addition built onto the front of the house. Without the addition it would look like many other country homes—two rooms plus central stair hall downstair and two equal-sized rooms plus central stair hall upstairs, plus of course the added kitchen/dining/bathroom addition on the back under a shed-type roof. But the addition on the front of the house makes it look a little strange, not unpretty, just strange. The front room is about 14 by 22 feet and has a porch wrapping all the way around it. We were told by some of the neighbors that the story was the front room had been added on as a school room for the community. It was a story that made sense—it was an unusual room; I could not remember ever seeing one like it.

Going on into the house, the front room is large and airy. It's a kind of an old-fashioned version of the more recent "great room". It has two doors with glass a window on three sides, and it's made to feel more spacious by the ceiling having been taken out by the previous owner. He had covered the underside of the rafters with insulation and cedar boards. It made me a little nervous though because there didn't seem to be enough in the way of structural ties holding the sidewalls from bulging. Also the cedar boards had been applied directly over the insulation, which is not firesafe. I guess the porch roofs are acting as stiffening for the sidewalls of the living room. More about that stuff later.

Something else I noticed on our first visit—not immediately, mind you—after meandering around the house a few minutes I noticed the walls were inordinately thin. I noticed it at the door frames. I thought, that's a mighty thin door frame; that means the wall are even thinner. I added the thicknesses in my head—the siding plus the inner tongue-in-groove combined don't leave enough room for studs. There are no studs. I reckoned the whole exterior wall, including inside and outside surfaces were about two and a quarter inches thick. That leaves about an inch for stucture. That's when it came into my head—board construction. I said to Jack, "Looky here, there are no studs." Jack was surprised too. I told him I had actually heard of such a thing before, from a friend in Pennsylvania many years ago. But this is Tennessee. Anyway, although this construction type was not in my experience, the house is straight and strong and had been that way for almost a hundred years. So I didn't see anything to be worried about.

Well, after that first visit we discussed it with Jack and made a low-ball offer with some qualifications in it. I don't remember what they were but they rejected it out of hand and I don't blame them. They wanted to sell as is. I would have felt the same way if it were me. So we reconsidered.

On the second trip I went to get a pretty good look at barn the and the 2 acres that had been exluded from the property description by the recent stake survey. I thought, "well I'll be darned if I'm going to buy this property and leave the land with the barn for someone else to mess with," when it's right there setting almost in my side yard. Besides the spring is on the barn portion of the land. So Jack looked up the record and found they had tried to sell the whole plot, including barn, for around 70,000 a little more than a year prior, but for some reason they excluded the barn and tried to sell the house with the remainder of the land. So we took all our extra requirements off the contract and made a higher offer for the whole plot of land. This time they took it and we were happy.

We went to our bank to encumber our home in town with a mortgage, drew out some savings and got a certified check for the closing. We had our insurance lady come out one day also. Then Leslie and Nancy Rivers drove out early on the day of closing to make sure the sellers had moved out their furniture and to be sure the house that the house was still standing, which it was. That was the first time Nancy had seen the house and she was so impressed that, on the way back, she made Leslie an offer of 10,000 to buy out our contract on the house. She wanted the place for herself. Of course Leslie said we'll keep it, thank you very much.

On the day of closing we met the sellers in the hallway outside the attorney's office. They told us their story, how they loved to go spend time at their country house, how their daughter loved it, but she died of cancer. The wife said she couldn't bear to go down there anymore. We could sympathize, and we thanked them for selling us the house.